Module 1: Graduate Program Reflections

“Forget CNN or any of the major American ‘news’ networks. If you want to get the latest on the opposition protests in Iran, you should be reading blogs, watching YouTube or following Twitter updates from Tehran, minute-by-minute” (Berman 1). Indeed, the realization of what Allen Kay envisioned as the “pervasive generation” in 1992, was evident in the streets of Tehran in 2009, with protesters “eminently portable, intimately personal and ultimately connected” (O’Leary 30). Cell phones, laptops, video cameras, as well as cell phones and laptops with video cameras, combined with social media and web2.0 tools, and connected to cellular, wireless and social networks, have eroded the publication constraints that once limited and filtered the general publics access to information. The masses living in the moment—this pervasive generation—with “new kinds of social media are challenging those traditional levers of state media control and allowing Iranians to find novel ways around the restrictions” (Stone, and Cohen 1) .

Iran’s recent “Twitter revolution” highlights how access to technology has increased our access to information, a bottom-up, peer-to-peer process where, as Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams would offer, mass collaboration and communication changes everything. Information, once the exclusive domain of centralized authorities whether that be the State or the Press, is now discovered, developed and dispersed by distributed individuals and groups, loosely coupled across not only technical, but social networks. New media, as Andrew L. Shapiro asserts, fosters “a potentially radical shift of who is in control of information, experience and resources” (Croteau, and Hoynes 321).